One of my biggest hobbies is flying with MS Flight Simulator, on a serious way. We all know the people who like to fly a circuit with a Cessna and couldn't think of a more pleasurable way to end their flight than crashing the plane and seeing how the aircraft model explodes into pieces of metal. The fun I have with Flight Simulator is to simulate a flight as good as possible. Most of the time I fly with a KLM Boeing 737 on European routes using state of the art utilities like additional panels, adventures, navigation computers, etc.

As you could have read in the introduction, I also fly for TradeWind Caribbean Airlines, a virtual airline with more than 400 "pilots" worldwide. TCA is mainly concentrating on the Caribbean area in their line schedule, but I am the responsible person for the Intercontinental part of the airline. You can visit my department via the link below, if you don't know it already.

I've been playing with FS since I was only 8 or 9 years old. I was always fascinated by aircraft and civil aviation. I remember we had FS2.0 on our XT-computer. All I did with is was flying those endless circuits over Meigs Field near Chicago. Later we got FS3.0 followed closely by FS4.0. I worked many years with this version. The addon Aircraft & Scenery Designer was a great tool to create new airports with.

But time's going fast when you have fun, and FS5.0, followed by FS5.1 came out. FS5.1 is the version I've been flying with for the longest time so far. Some highlights for me personally were the work I did for TCA in the Caribbean area. I spent hours and hours in my virtual cockpit flying TCA Cessna's in the Caribbean area. Man, I did a lot of island-hopping those days! Later I flew mainly jet routes with the A320 and 737. I did this for a long time too but a little later I lost a big part of  my interest in the Caribbean area and moved to Europe. Another highlight was the world tour I made with a Cessna. Floris Wouterlood, a Dutch writer of FS-books, wrote a good book about the tour around the world some Americans made back in 1924. It was a big adventure that time. Now I found it a challenge to fly this route at home with FS. The hours were long and lonely in my cockpit above some parts of the world, but I made it without using any time compression or slew function.

Nowadays I'm still enthousiastic in Europe. I use the newest version, Fs98, mainly for KLM routes which I fly over the European continent. Tools like NavDash, the KLM1023/4 adventure and all the freeware sceneries make the fun bigger and bigger.

Furtheron I was concerned in the Amsterdam-London adventure project. Robert van der Leije, who is a good friend of mine, has been working many years to realease his KLM1023/4 adventure project. It features a highly realistic simulation of this daily flight, normally operated with a Boeing 737 (for pic see above). Authentic recordings of real Air Traffic Control follows your flight to London and back. Furtheron it features a weather generator, it has a public address function (for various cabin announcements during the flight), random ATIS functions, etc etc etc. The list is too long to mention it all. If you like, take a look at Robert's homepage and download the adventure. It's also available via Flightsim.com.

A screenshot of ProController (click on the picture to enlarge)